My life with the Eskimo

Chapter I

THE plans of my second expedition took gradual shape during the years 1901-1907, while I was still north of the Arctic circle engaged n the work of my first expedition.

It was once intende- that I should be the ethnologist of the Leffingwell-Mikkelsen Actic Expedition, sometimes known as the American Pola Expedition, which sailed from Victoria, olumbia, in the spring of 1906. When the proposal was me I found it an attractive one in everything except this e expedition’s schooner, the Duchess of Bedford , was unproved with auxiliary motive power, and my book knowledge of Arctic conditions made me fear that she would never reach the proposed site of operations, the west coast of Victoria Island. Mr. Leffingwell and I therefore agreed that I should not join the expedition in Victoria as did its other members, but should go overland and down the Mackenzie River to meet them at Herschel Island, which lies about eighty miles west of the Mackenzie delta. My reason was that if the expedition failed to get so far east I should be able to occupy my time profitably in the study of the scientifically unknown Mackenzie Eskimo. On the other hand, if nothing obstructed the expedition I should be able to join it in early August and proceed with it eastward toward Victoria Island. It turned out that the Duchess of Bedford had good fortune until she reached Point Barrow. At that point the ice blocked her further advance until the season had become late and she was finally overtaken by winter on the north coast of Alaska at Flaxman Island. She was never able, therefore, to pick me up, and I consequently never became a member of the expedition. From the point of view of the ethnologist, this was a very fortunate circumstance. Alth<

I had always doubted that the ship would come to pick me •' had nevertheless intrusted my entire outfit to her, for I wp

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I lived with the Eskimo at all, to live exactly as one of them, in their houses, dressing like them, and eating only su^h food as they did. I now found myself, in accord with my own plan, set down two hundred miles north of the polar circle, wit! a summer suit of clothing, a camera, some notebooks, a rifle, and about two hundred rounds of ammunition, facing an Arctic winter, where my only shelter would have to be the roof of some hospitable Eskimo house.

These were ideal conditions for me. Hd I had my own party and my own house I should have lived near the Eskimo instead of with them. I should have seen them as ;n outsider, a stranger. If I had visited them now and then, I should have found them wearing their company manners and shouldhave obtained no better * insight into their lives than does the ordinary missionary or ' Now my very poverty was my greatest advantage ; 1 was and powerful like the whaling captains or mounted police there was no reason why they should flatter me or show mt ence. I had no visible means, and therefore what they did for was without hope of reward. They took me into their houses and treated me hospitably and courteously, but exactly as if I were one of them. They gave me clothes to wear and food to eat, I helped them in their work and joined in their games, until they gradually forgot that I was not one of them, and began to live their lives before my eyes as if I were not there. This gave me a rare opportunity to know them as they are.

The details of that winter are not a part of the present story, although the things I learned have not only been useful to me since, but have also furnished the incentive to five years of further exploration. To begin with, I found that the Eskimo language, although exceedingly difficult for a European to learn, was not impossible of acquisition, for at the end of a winter in the house of the Mackenzie Eskimo I already had a good foundation in it. The people, too, were agreeable. They were not only interesting from a scientific point of view, as all primitive people must be to the student of mankind, but they were cheerful, self-reliant, and 'rable companions. They are people among whom you might bly have enemies and among whom you were certaii to make people very much like you and me, but with the social virtues developed rather more highly than they have been among our own race. In a difficult struggle for existence under hard natural conditions they have acquired the ability to live together in peace and good will.

But what led most definitely to the planning of my second expedition was that I learned that to the eastward of Cape Bathurst the Mackenzie Eskimo wTere unaware of the existence of any people. The coast of Dolphin and Union Straits had been mapped by Dr. John Richardson in 1826, but he had seen none of its inhabitants. My knowledge of the habits of the Eskimo led me to suspect that his finding no people was in itself no proof of the non-existence of people on this portion of the mainland, for he had skirted the coast in summer when the natives were likely to be inland caribou hunting. Further, the English explorers had seen Eskimo on Coronation Gulf and on Victoria Island in the first half of the eighteenth century, and these people had not been visited since. It would be interesting to revisit them after sixty years. At Herschel Island I happened to meet Captain Amundsen on his way west from his now famous voyage of the Northwest Passage, and I found that he also had sailed past these shores without seeing any people and in fact without opportunity of seeing any.

A whaling ship also brought news of interest. The schooner Olga , commanded by Captain Klinkenberg, had wintered somewhere to the eastward, and had seen Eskimo. The captain, when he landed at Herschel Island, announced that he had spent the winter on Banks Island. But this I think was believed by few of the whaling captains, and seemed entirely improbable to me, for his own description of the country in which he had wintered showed clearly that it could have been no portion of Banks Island, unless indeed Banks Island were very different from the descriptions and charts we have of it. While no one could be certain, therefore, just where the Olga had wintered, it was generally agreed that it must have been somewhere on Victoria Island, and the majority favored Minto Inlet, to which Captain Klinkenberg himself later on agreed. I shall not here take time by the forelock to say just where it eventually turned out that he had wintered, for we did not discover that interesting fact until May of 1911, but the important thing was that wherever it might have been, Captain Klinkenberg had there seen Eskimo who were armed with bows and arrows, who used copper implements, and who evidently had therefore been in no contact with white men in recent years. The white men and Eskimo of the crew of the Olga brought back many semi-fabulous stories which they had got from these Eskimo; their divergence from actual truth is to be explained partly by the inability of the Alaskan Eskimo on the ship to understand the dialect of their eastern countrymen with whom they associated for only a few days all together.

Shortly after my return from the first expedition in the early winter of 1907, my plans for scientific exploration in the Arctic were laid before Dr. Herman C. Bumpus, Director of the American Museum of Natural History. It seemed possible that there might exist on the north shore of the continent of America, and possibly on Banks Island and Victoria Island, people who had not seen a white man, either they or their ancestors, and there almost certainly were other people who themselves had not seen white men, although the ancestors of some of them might have been explorers of Franklin’s own party or else men of the Franklin Search. True, some prominent authorities on the Eskimo did believe that the islands west of King William Island were inhabited. One of these men told me that I should certainly find no people on the west coast of Victoria Island, for all the Eskimo seen there by Collinson and M’Clure (1852-1853) had long ago moved east to Hudson Bay to trade with the whalers. Acting on these opinions, the Canadian Government had issued in 1906 a map on which the word “Uninhabited” is printed in red letters across the face of Victoria Island, where we eventually found a dense population, as Eskimo go.

The scientific importance of the study of these people by an ethnologist was clear to Dr. Bumpus and appealed no less strongly to Dr. Clark Wissler, the Museum’s curator of anthropology. They both assured me at once of their interest in my plans, and from that point on it was merely a question of financial detail to make the expedition a certainty. The funds were not available to support a large expedition; the purchase of a ship and its equipment with the customary paraphernalia of Arctic exploration were out of the question — neither did it seem necessary to have such complex equipment for so simple a task as that of ascertaining whether or not human beings live in a certain stretch of country. Our thesis was this : that we were not looking for any waste places, but for land occupied by human beings ; if those human beings were there at all, they must be Eskimo supporting themselves by the most primitive implements of the chase ; and it seemed clear that if Eskimo could live there, armed as they must be with bows and arrows, and not only live there but bring up their children and take care of their aged, then surely we, armed with modern rifles, would be able to live in that sort of country as long as we pleased and to go about in it as we liked. Of course the thesis was bound to prove out.

I had at first considered going north alone, relying entirely on the support of the Mackenzie River Eskimo for my journey toward the eastward in the search of their hypothetical countrymen, but one day a letter came which changed my plans at once. I had often considered the possibility of taking some one with me, and in thinking over all the available men whom I knew, I had always felt that one of them was qualified before all others, and the letter I got was from that very man, Dr. R. M. Anderson, a classmate in the University of Iowa and a friend of mine for many years. I had known him in the University as one of those exceptional men who won honors both through scholarship and athletic ability. He had been captain of track teams ; he held various athletic records ; he was a crack rifle shot ; he was experienced in roughing it in various places, and had also been a soldier in the Spanish-American war ; he held the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and had written learned books and articles on birds and animals, and was now tired of civilization and eager for a chance to go north with me. As soon as I showed his letter to the Museum authorities it was agreed that we must do everything to get him to go along, for they knew him by reputation and it was at once clear to all of us that by his going the scope of the expedition could be doubled; for whereas I was but an ethnologist, a student of men and their works, he could study the animal life also of the little-known and unknown districts we expected to traverse. Besides, his being with me would double my own chances of success, for it is often difficult to get Eskimo to leave their own country for the exploration of, to them, unknown districts, and if there were two of us together we could at all times, if we desired, be independent of the assistance of the Eskimo, could do what we liked and go where we pleased ; whereas a man who is alone cannot safely make long journeys on an uninhabited Arctic coast.

Our equipment was the simplest possible. It consisted merely of two cameras that used films of the same size ; a supply of films for these cameras ; a pair of rifles that were the best that money could buy, and a thousand rounds of ammunition for these rifles ; half a dozen ordinary rifles and shot guns for the use of the Eskimo, and ammunition for these ; two pairs of six-power field glasses, also the best that the market afforded ; writing materials, pens and pencils ; two silk tents ; a little tobacco for the use of our prospective Eskimo employees ; some aluminum cooking utensils, and very little else. The outfit we took down the Mackenzie River weighed less than a ton, and yet with one exception — to be later noted — it contained all the essentials for Arctic exploration of the sort that we had planned. We considered that carrying food to the Arctic was carrying coal to Newcastle.

The first ^ps of the journey were very simple. I left New York April 22d, 1908, and joined in Toronto Dr. Anderson, who had preceded me there by a few days, for we had arranged with Mr. R. F. Stupart, Director of the Dominion Meteorological Service, to establish for him six Meteorological stations along the Mackenzie River between Edmonton and the Arctic coast, and Dr. Anderson had gone to Toronto to take charge of the instruments and equipment for these stations. From here we went to Winnipeg and thence to Edmonton, over the new line of the Canadian Northern Railway, which had just opened up vast tracts of fertile farm lands lying well to the north of the older Canadian Pacific road.

In Edmonton, as everywhere else along the line of our travel, people took the kindliest interest in our plans, and did everything to help us on our way. The private individuals who did us services are too many to mention, but of greater value to us than any one thing was the good will of the Hudson’s Bay Company, extended through its commissioner, Mr. C. C. Chipman of Winnipeg. There was a time when the Hudson’s Bay Company owned Canada, and still more recently they were in such absolute control of vast districts that their friendly support was an essential to any one who traveled in the country. To-day along the Mackenzie system their competitors in the fur trade have planted their stations every few hundred miles, yet even now the great Company is a power whose sphere stretches to the Polar Sea.

We had at first intended to transfer our equipment to the Arctic in a York boat belonging to the Church of England. I had made arrangements for doing this with my friend and former fellowtraveler, Bishop Reeve, previously of the Mackenzie diocese but now stationed in Toronto. But it turned out on our arrival in Edmonton that this boat had not yet been built; nor was there immediate prospect of its being built. We therefore accepted the kind offer of Mr. Christie, Chief Clerk of the Mackenzie district, to become his guests on the first boats of the Company to go down the Athabasca River that spring. Civilization is continually making further inroads into the wilderness of the North. Since that time a railroad has been built from Edmonton ninety miles north to Athabasca Landing, but when we went north this was a two-days journey by stage. At Athabasca* Landing was the most northerly post office and telegraph office, and from it we sent out our last messages and bade good-by to civilization — in the form in which that word is understood by the majority of men. Of course the two thousand miles of the Mackenzie Valley to the north of us were occupied at intervals by white men. These were the trappers and traders who from the point of view of the city dweller and the farmer are living in the wilderness, although I must confess that from the point of view of the Arctic explorer they seem to be dwelling in the heart of civilization.

The three scows over which Mr. Christie had immediate command left Athabasca Landing at two in the afternoon of May 7th. The Athabasca had been ice-free for but a few days, and huge blocks of ice were even now piled along its banks in windrows. The mosquitoes, the plague of the northern forest, were not yet out in any numbers, and the down-river journey was a pleasant one. Generally we floated with the current, but occasionally our Indian crews would take the oars and row awhile.

As this is to be a story of Arctic exploration we shall give but little space to the northward journey, although it is picturesque in itself and although it leads one through land strange to the ordinary traveler. The trading posts of the Hudson’s Bay Company were located along the river’s northward course, at distances averaging about two hundred miles apart. The first one hundred and sixty-five miles of the Athabasca River, from the Landing to the “ Grand Rapids, ” form a stretch of shoal water nevertheless navigable by flat-bottomed steamers of light draft, and although we now traveled in the typical eight-ton spruce-wood freight scows of the Hudson’s Bay Company, I had two years before traveled the same section of the journey aboard the steamer Midnight Sun. Although the Midnight Sun carried no freight but instead pushed several loaded freight scows in front of her, her fourteen inches or so of draft were too many for the depth of the river and we had kept running aground, bumping into rocks and having various accidents. At one time we stove a hole in the steamer’s bottom and sank, but as the sinking only meant the settling of a few inches, it was a serious matter only from the point of view of delay. I have forgotten just how we went about the repairs. I am not sure but they may have raised her with jackscrews — at least that is a method which would seem practical enough in most cases of shipwreck on the Athabasca.

We made the one hundred and sixty-five miles in 1906 at an average speed of thirteen miles per day, which is very likely a low record for downstream steamboat navigation. On our present journey we got along much faster and reached “Grand Rapids Island” on May 12th. The river here has a considerable fall ; the rapid on the west side of the island is impassable for any craft, while on the east side it may be run with comparative safety with unloaded or lightly loaded boats. This is risky business, however, in freighting, and the Hudson’s Bay Company have built a tramway the full half mile of the island’s length, and over this all the freight and some of the boats are usually transported while a few of the empty boats are run down the eastern channel.

From Grand Rapids for a hundred miles to Fort MacMurray the

York Boat going over Cascade Rapid, Athabasca.

SCOW RUNNING BOILER RAPID, ATHABASCA.

stream is here and there interrupted by rapids, none of them serious for good canoe men, although the big freight scows when heavily loaded occasionally come to grief. The freight carried in the boats is always insured and accidents therefore do not mean any great loss of money, but it is a very inconvenient thing for that particular Hudson’s Bay post to which the stores of the sunken boat had been consigned. It happens occasionally that a boat carrying most or all of the consignment to a certain post is wrecked and that the post is then compelled to go a year without such articles as tea, tobacco, prints, ribbons, chewing gum, and other things which the Indians nowadays consider the necessaries of life. It would seem that the Company might distribute the loss so as to make it fall less heavily on any particular post, but for some reason they do not generally do this.

Each freight scow has a crew consisting of three or four rowers, a bowsman, and a steersman. The bowsman knows the rapids fairly well and is a good judge of water ; he stands in the front end of the boat with a pole raised above his head, which he manipulates so as to indicate to the steersman the direction that the boat should take. The steersman, however, is the most important member of the crew. He is the man of the greatest experience, resourceful, and has a reputation for knowing these particular rapids. When the boat approaches a rapid the steersman gives the word and all the oarsmen row as hard as possible so as to keep steerage way on the craft. With the speed of the water at anything from six to nine or ten miles an hour, and with an additional weight on the boat of perhaps a mile and a half or two miles due to the rowing, one’s progress through the rapids is somewhat spectacular, although the real danger does not seem to be great ; for although boats are wrecked and cargoes sunk, I never heard of a single man losing his life. Still, the thing is considered dangerous locally, and a steersman who has an accident usually loses his nerve so completely that he never conducts a boat through the rapids again. Yet this is not a universal rule, for some steersmen whom I know have had several accidents.

Some of the rapids are dangerous only in periods of low water. These low periods are irregular and cannot be predicted, for they depend apparently chiefly on the rainfall and the melting of the snow in the mountains of British Columbia. Such a rapid as the Cascade may even disappear in really high water ; in stages of phenomenally low water it becomes impassable for boats, for it is but a plunge of water over a sharp ledge with a knifelike edge that may catch the boat’s bottom and balance the boat so that it can go neither down nor back.

Coming down the river we continually had before our eyes examples of how a new country, careless of its rich natural resources, allows them to go to waste. The value of the spruce forests of Canada is apparent to those who theorize about it, but here day after day we traveled through a haze of forest fires, some of them burning at unknown distances from the river, others coming down to its very banks, with the flames licking the water.

Sometimes these fires start no one knows how ; sometimes people know and do not tell and sometimes they are started intentionally by Indians, who consider that the hunting is made better by clearing the land so that they can see the game from greater distances. To do this is as shortsighted a policy for the Indian as it is for the government to allow its being done. True, there are forest rangers, but these I suppose exist to fulfill the letter of some law and to draw a salary. There is one who plies over two hundred and fifty miles from Athabasca Landing to Fort MacMurray, and another a somewhat shorter distance from Fort MacMurray to Smith Landing. But even he who has the shorter beat makes but three trips a year and these are perfunctory. One of these rangers was a fellow passenger with us and did exactly as we did, — sat in his boat and lazily watched the flames as we drifted down the river. No doubt he reported the occurrence and presumably it was somewhere tabulated, to become a part of a useful body of statistics.

On my previous trip down the river, in 1906, there was in our company Mr. Elihu Stewart, Forestry Commissioner for the Dominion of Canada, and as he has made a report on the forest resources of the Mackenzie Valley, there is far less reason than otherwise for my dwelling on the extent of its natural wealth — vast even yet in spite of the periodic fires. It will give some idea to say that there were in 1908 two sawmills near the south shore of Great Slave Lake that made lumber suitable for the building of steamboats, and that trees twelve inches in diameter, six feet above the ground, grow tall and graceful in the Mackenzie delta less than a hundred miles south of the tidewater of the Polar Sea.

The thing that impresses a stranger in the country, and one to which a person of any feeling or imagination does not soon grow callous, is the cruelty and thoughtlessness with which dogs are treated in the north. It is a common thing that they are not fed all summer, and some therefore die of staiwation, while most of them survive only as living skeletons until the approach of fall makes it necessary to feed them up in order that they may have some strength for the coming winter. And it is not merely that they are never fed — to show kindness to a dog is an unheard-of thing. If he merely passes your tent door, walking along and minding his business, it is good form for you to seize a hatchet or a hammer or anything that is near and throw it out to see if you can hit him. If you happen to knock an eye out or break a leg, it is considered an excellent joke, unless the dog’s particular owner should be near, in which case he is offended; not because he feels for the dog, but merely because he thinks that showing offense may give him some chance of recovering damages. Some of the white men treat the dogs a little better than the average Indian or half-breed, but a dog used to kindness is nevertheless a thing that I do not remember seeing. The result is that the poor dogs, who always expect a kick, will always receive your approach with a snarl. By buying some of these dogs and using them myself, I have found that even after this sort of bringing up they quickly become under kind treatment as friendly as our house dogs at home.

Most of the men who composed our crews owned dogs, and when we left Athabasca Landing these to the number of twenty or so followed us along the banks of the river. The river frequently curves, and the boat channel generally lies now along one bank of the stream and now along the other. The poor dogs seemed to think each time our boat swung to one side of the river that we were about to land there, and those on the far side would accordingly take the water and swim over to us and land ; but soon the boat channel would take us across the stream again, and again the dogs would take the water. The poor animals were weak from hunger, but had they known how to husband their strength they could probably have followed us a good many days ; as it was, one by one they began to drop out and be left behind, many of them, no doubt, eventually to die of starvation. A thing that made the road of the dogs all the more difficult was that as we proceeded downstream the quantities of drift-ice stranded along the river’s edge became greater and greater; the broken blocks were piled in windrows from twelve to twenty feet high, and to climb over these quickly tired the dogs out.

Our first accident occurred on Sunday, the 10th of May. We had passed Pelican Portage at noon and at three o’clock we were running a small rapid. Our boat and the second one went through safely, but the last, occupied by Mr. Christie and Mr. Bremner, was stove on a rock and was a third full of water before they succeeded in running it aground. We put our scows immediately ashore and went to the rescue, but before we were able to empty the boat it had sunk in shallow water, and some sugar, tea, and other goods got spoiled. Still, the accident was not a very serious one, and by 6.30 in the evening we were on the road again. Our Indian steersman commented upon the fact that this was a Sunday accident, and pointed out that his long experience on the river showed him that accidents often occur to boats that run on Sundays.

The following day we came to the Grand Hapids of the Athabasca, but stopped for a little while two or three miles south of the rapids at a place where two years before I had helped to bury an unknown Englishman, — unknown to all of us except that we knew his name was Herbert Bray. He had been cook on the Midnight Sun , had been taken sick a few days before we reached the rapids, and had been abused and maligned by everybody because he was supposed to be playing sick on account of being too lazy to do his own work. Nobody thought that there was anything serious the matter with him until one evening he died quietly. The next day we dug him a grave above high-water mark among the thick spruce trees. Mr. Stewart, the Forestry Commissioner, carved his name on a blazed tree, and I climbed the tree to make him the memorial of the North — the lop-stick. This consists in taking a tall and preferably isolated spruce tree and lopping off its branches for a dis-